KSTP-AM pulled the plug on its thirty-year, once-wildly-successful experiment with talk radio this week.<\/p>\n
General Manager Ginny Morris, from the station’s website<\/a>:<\/p>\n Radio is an ever-changing landscape and throughout its 87-year history, KSTP-AM has been known for many things. In the very earliest days, when my grandfather was programming the station, we covered a lot of news and carried the NBC radio network, we aired soap operas and played many different types of music. Later, when my dad ran the station, he played Jazz and classical music, and then evolved into playing rock music, which at times dismayed his dad.<\/p>\n On Monday, February 15, we evolve again, and you will know us as AM1500 The SportsTalk Station.<\/p>\n Joe Soucheray and Patrick Reusse invented SportsTalk in this town – arguably in the country – and we look forward to featuring them together every afternoon. They are wonderfully talented entertainers and storytellers, as individuals and as a team, and they will anchor our new line-up that we think you will enjoy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Well, we could hardly enjoy it any less than the one the station’s had for the past year or two.<\/p>\n I more or less predicted this<\/a> a little over a year ago.\u00a0 KSTP’s been drifting toward…something for a long time, now.<\/p>\n A little background:\u00a0 After almost sixty years as one of the leading radio stations in the country (in the ’30s and ’40s), and then one of the top music stations in the metro (60s and early 70s), KSTP-AM switched to talk radio in about 1980; music radio had pretty well died on AM radio by that point.\u00a0 And in the days of the “Fairness Doctrine”, it nearly died again; Hubbard Broadcasting was actively seeking a buyer for its once-flagship station, amid rumors that the FCC would soon decommission the entire AM band.\u00a0 It even stuck the AM operation in the old transmitter shack, on Highway 61, to make it easier to move.\u00a0 It’s asking price in 1986? A ludicrous $5 million (or so said the rumor among the staff at the time, of which I was one).<\/p>\n And then, in 1987, Ronald Reagan killed the “Fairness” Doctrine, opening up the radio market to untrammelled political talk of all kinds.<\/p>\n A consultant pitched this new host – Rush Limbaugh – to KSTP’s management, saying that sure, Limbaugh was political, but his schtick was much more about his irreverence and humor.\u00a0 So Hubbard took a chance.<\/p>\n And it paid off handsomely; in 1986, the AM station was the poor cousin of the Hubbard family.\u00a0 By 2003, with Limbaugh, Jason Lewis, Bob Davis and the newly-“conservative” Joe Soucheray dominating their time slots, the AM station was rolling in money, and financially carrying the rest of the Hubbard slate (“Chick-Talk 107”, KS95, and Channels 5 and 45), making so much money they were able to experiment way <\/em>outside the format with hosts like Tom Mischke.<\/p>\n But the rumors were always there; Hubbard didn’t like being “conservative”.\u00a0 Ginny Morris pined for the days when her grandfather’s KSTP, like its hereditary nemesis WCCO, was all things to all people, offended nobody, and was the broadcast pillar of the community (back when the community had three newspapers, three TV stations, a couple dozen radio stations – and that was it).<\/p>\n